A Chorus of Crashing Waves
by EhrynnWallace23
Summary: Alfred is a violinist on the Titanic. Arthur is the singer at the lower lounge, who may not be who he says he is. If only it ended there, but the story never seems to go that way.


**Hello, readers! This is my first Hetalia fan fiction, so I hope all goes well. I mysteriously typed almost four thousand words in one night, which is a good record for me. The pairing is America and England, though I've chosen to use their human names since this is an AU. In this story, Alfred is a violinist on the Titanic, and Arthur is the Britannia Angel, a singer in the upper lounge. I think we all know how the voyage ends up, but I'm not the kind of writer to end it there. **

**Anyway, I really hope you enjoy this! If you like it or think I need to make any changes, just comment and I'll gladly accept your criticism. Actually, I tend to explicitly ask for criticism, but that's very rare for some reason. At least with some others it is. **

**-E. W. Collier**

CHAPTER ONE

The salt. The bitter, biting cold. The ever-present mist over the horizon and the trail of curling white foam at our feet. The sun, rising and setting, hiding behind the clouds, and peeking out in trains of gold. The indigo waves that in all our might could crush us in a second.

We learn in school that the Earth is spinning fast and spinning fast again, and we accept it, but we never feel it. The ground is so solid beneath us, and up is up and down is down. If that's true, then how can we be ricocheting through the universe, tucked in our fragile little galaxy as everything else expands and we are pushed towards oblivion? It's the kind of thought that makes your head hurt, so we don't think about it. We don't think about how infinitesimally tiny we are, how tiny and how weak.

It's when we get on a ship the first time and find ourselves at the mercy of the water and the wind and the sky above that it starts to dawn on us. No big wall of ship can save us when we go down. The sea likes her victims raw. We're tiny on a lake, and that's tiny on an ocean, and that is small, so small, in the world. I don't know about everyone else, since they're them, but when my feet are on the deck I can feel it. I can feel us hurtling towards the end of time faster than we might believe. I can feel my life balance on a deck railing, inside a cabin, in a bucket of fish.

My dad would say I should have been a sailor. I probably should have been. I have the sky in my heart and the sea pumping through my veins, and honestly, I wouldn't have hated it, not at all. Life as a flyboy or a sailor sounds more than good enough for me.

But I also had music in every inch of me, pouring through my dreams, snapping my fingers to an invisible beat, making me hum when I walk. It'd been that way since I was a kid and I learned the concept of music. Got my first recorder when I was three, was banging out tunes on the piano when I was five, and was given my violin when I was eleven. There are chords strung in my mind.

I ended up joining the orchestras and bands at every school I encountered. Admittedly, they were very little. The wide plains of Minnesota were rich as rail owners in farms and forests, but they weren't that great, school-wise. I learned from the family primer from what must have been the sixties. Read the Bible, too, all the way through—not because I'm a faithful man, which I'm not, but because I wanted to be able to read. We also had a worn copy of a Michigan newspaper. I used to read and reread the articles, even though it was from ninety-three and the events were long since passed, and I picked apart the cooking article and the short story about the Downeastern Whelmer on Eerie like a treasure trove. I got into math as I got into music—fractions and counting were about as far as I got. Those "x's" and fancy lines were not for me.

I remember my first school, when I was nine and we moved nearer to a town so my younger brother and I could get an education. "Can't grow without learning," Ma had told me, and those words have stuck to me to this day. It was in the downtown chapel, painted white but always with a sheen of dust, and a decent block of shade in the back. I sat in the corner more times than I could count, for reasons I can't remember. I was fairly smart for my kind. Maybe I was too smart, and that's the reasoning.

Yeah, I remember that place—it smelled like metal all the time—and I remember the good times I shared with my school recorder. My ma and pa and Matt and I had settled near a river—a shallow one, with a few good fishing spots and a nice waterfall to cool off by—and it was the hub for not only me but also the other boys of the town. On sunny afternoons after school they'd rush through their chores as fast as they could and have their collars straight and their words nice so their mas would let them come to my river. But sometimes it was a bit cooler, and I would have the place to myself. I would grab my recorder, go to a rock on the tip of the waterfall, and play pretty tunes to the beat of the waterfall, tapping my feet over the edge. I used to pretend that I was playing before the whole town on a special day, and all the ladies would be in their best dresses and the men in their good suits and hats. They, in my imagination, would watch me with rapt attention, and when I would finish with a flourish they'd whoop and holler like the state preacher had come around and given a speech. I bowed then, and hopped back into the grass.

Looking back on it, the days in Minnesota were some hard times. The crickets ate the cornfield as they ran away from the drought, and then of course the drought came along. The cow gave as much milk as we could squeeze out money, and it was good that our land patch was good but cheap because we were nearly thrown out then. Ma had no patience for Pa and vice versa, and neither of them had patience for me. The patience was dumped on Matt's head hard enough that he disappeared entirely. I even had to sell my little piano, which was one of the saddest days of my childhood.

But they were good, too, always good times. Even if we had a rabbit every week we'd sit down with a happy state of mind. Sometimes, as I grew older, I'd play my violin for the family. Everyone told me I ought to call it as it was, a fiddle, but there's a difference between fiddling and violins. When you fiddle the sound is wild and joyful and sounds like home—sounds like Christmas pie and fireside nights and cold winters where the windows were whitewashed in snow. Violins—it's hard to explain. Violins are long and deep and wise and solemn. Violins are anthems for the far, far away and the devastatingly beautiful. I had a _violin_, not a fiddle, and I told people that.

But in those days, we would play ball in the town square and race in the fields outside town. Ma would cuff the back of my head regularly and Pa taught me how to hunt. I was a good hunter. Friendships were made and broken based on who huddled up to whom on freezing winter nights. We moved so often that family was everything to us. You couldn't break us, the Williams, naw, you couldn't.

Of course, all things ended. I turned sixteen in the July of 1906. I learned Ma and Pa were really Aunt and Uncle and that my own parents were dead. Didn't matter to me; didn't change how I thought about them, but once it was out things got tense. Ma said I was a waste of space. Pa left to work in the lines down south for extra money. I tried to help out, but one thing led to another and just a week before the first snowfall I was chucked out with my violin, a rolled bag of clothes, and my true parents' inheritance to make my fortune somewhere else.

The rest of my story ain't that good. My road took me to Detroit and then to New York, where I found myself in dusty restaurants playing. Eventually I was picked up by a small-scale orchestra, and then accepted into a music school in Queens. The days were long and tedious, but I was slowly climbing, and if it wasn't exhilarating, I still have to admit—I don't regret any of it, any of it at all.

I graduated in oh-eight, and not much changed then except that the places I played were more upscale. Got into another orchestra, one with more people and a better reputation, and made enough money to cart myself away from the country that was both my salvation and my undoing. I made for England—got on the ships when thousands of people were getting off and made my way to the old grand home of classical music: Europe. There were two orchestras there, which got me well off enough to buy myself a place in Cardiff, and then, in the eve of 1911, I was early-on recruited for the first voyage of the biggest cruise liner I'd encountered. I was twenty-two. It was a lot of success to take in, but it was an age of starting early in life.

That's now, suppose. Don't want to talk about the finer details—they're boring to others but they hurt me a lot. If I tell you the rest, nobody wins.

But here I was. The deck of the Titanic stretched to the edge of my vision both ways, but I wasn't focused there. I peered out at the sea, trying to memorize every fallible wave that hit the hull.

The rest of the ship was abuzz with the loading rituals. Sailors and passengers were stubbornly saying farewell to their family and friends. The conductor was zipping around between decks, looking frazzled as he took questions from the wealthy and stupid-looking who didn't know how to get inside. The portside was clogged with people.

I was content with leaning against the railing, briefcase by my side. I wasn't any stranger to the sea. I'd crossed it from America to Europe those years ago, and before that, when I still lived with my family, we'd take a trip every few years or so to the Great Lakes.

A man dressed in a loose rubber jumpsuit—he must be working in the belly of the hull—approached me. His hair was ruffled and almost white. He was smiling, but his eyes were sad. "Hey, dreamer boy!" I raised my eyes. "What're you doing all alone here? Don't your family want to say goodbye?" He spoke in a rough accent with a hint of German.

"Got none," I replied simply. "And you must be quick if you're done with 'em already."

"Hm. Got none," he echoed with a wink. "Ah, sorry, touchy topic?"

"Not really."

"Good, 'cause a lot of the time it ends up to be. Get kicked out of a few places. Ain't a touchy topic for me." He leaned against the railing a pace's length from me. "Guess I lied. I got a brother. 's name's Ludwig. He's head chef."

"Used to have a brother," I said. "Cousin, though. And even with what the books say, family isn't family unless they're your home. They aren't my home."

"Oh." The man stretched his arms over the side of the railing. "Sea breeze feels nice. A lot different from where I'm from."

"Same thing here, but I'm just about used to it by now," I said.

"Where are you from? Sound American."

"Got that right. Could say New York, for one, or Detroit, but if you go way back I'm from Minnesota." I wasn't really paying attention to what I was saying. I tended to do that, and though it was a big mistake I never bothered to change that. "And I hear a little German or somethin'?"

"Yeah. Farming village. I've been all the way to Japan and back to London but that damn accent still managed to stick. Guess your roots never really pry out, eh?"

"Guess not," I reiterated. "Well, now I feel a dunce—heard a little bit of your life and I still don't know your name."

He smirked. "Gilbert. Call me Gil, though, outside of middle Europe the 'Bert' sounds awkward. And who're you?"

I cleared my throat. I usually went with my old name, Alfred Williams, no middle name. And I liked Alfred, honestly. Went along with my personality, or at least it had begun to a while ago. But, hey, why not change myself on a boat of all places.

My thoughts drifted to a picture of my parents I'd seen shortly after I was kicked out. My real father, Frederick Jones, wanted to name me Frederick Jones and drill it into me to name my own son the same so when he was a grandfather he'd have a boy Frederick Jones the third. But my mother, the real one, wanted to name me Alfonso Jones after her deceased brother. Neither could find the high ground and neither could win, but they were pretty level-headed people, according to my Uncle Terrence, and they compromised on Alfred. I had a good laugh upon hearing that. Figures that that was how I was made to be who I am.

But now, thinking about it, I could honor their wishes both.

"Al…Alfonso Frederick Jones," I said. "Just call me Alfred. Mouthful otherwise."

"I'll bet you fifty cents you lied, but not really. Don't got that kind of money," Gil said. "But okay, Alfred Jones, I am pleased to meet you."

"That's the most formal I've ever heard you speak."

"Known me less than five minutes; calm down."

"So, anyway, why'd it take you so little to come up if you got people?" I asked.

He grinned widely like I'd just told him he was loved. "It's because my people are with me! Got Ludwig, you know, and my best mate Lizzy's a maid, then my boy Rod's the pianist."

"Pianist, huh? Tell him I say hey; I'm a violinist."

"Oh, Rod, you can't miss him. He's tall and twiggy, dark hair, glasses, zero tolerance for anything fun." Gil barked out a laugh that at my present point with him I could call obnoxious—but who was I to talk? "What shifts have you got?"

"I'm on the deck in the evening and the lower lounge at lunchtime. They're paying me a pretty penny."

"I'd imagine," he said. "Everything about this is rich. Rich passengers, rich reputation. I'm a belly boy and I'm being paid as much as I did heading a Laundromat in Cornwall."

"Laundromat to belly boy," I mused. "What got you there?"

"Eh, I've been all over, you know. Every country in this hemisphere. Met a lot of people, did a lot of things. Could have been rich but was too lazy to convert all my money. I washed up back in England about a year ago and Ludwig landed me a job."

"Good old brothers."

"Nah, he owed me a favor. Kind of a long story, but let's just say I dug him out of a tight spot when restlessness led to military led to a coma. Yessir, those were weird days."

I shrugged with a smile. "Same difference. Who does favors without needing to?" _Matthew, _my mind mentally said. I shook the thought off. He hadn't tried to look for me, not once, in six years, and if that doesn't account for leaving someone behind I don't know what that is.

"Hm. You know where your cabin is?"

I snorted. "I don't even know where to find out where my cabin is."

"Aw, what kind of fool are you? You've been on this ship dreaming away like the dreamer boy you are for longer than I've been aboard and I've got myself in. Come on, let me show you the ropes."

At this point, I wasn't about to say no, so I grabbed my suitcase (really a converted typewriter case) in one hand and my violin case in the other. He secured his navy cap on his head, tucking in a few white hairs, and took off, weaving through the congested deck. It was easy enough to keep up—I was taller than the average man on the deck. He turned into a passage warning "EMPLOYEES ONLY", to which I suppose I counted, and it wasn't until we were halfway down that he slowed down suddenly enough to send me tumbling into him.

"Whoa, dreamer boy, going on a little fast there. Why'd it take you so long to catch up?"

I didn't know how to answer that without being rude, but on the same note, I still wanted to answer. "I can see why you're a belly boy, being as quick as you are. If the ship got in danger you'd move so quick that we would go back in time."

Gil coughed. "That a compliment?"

"Ye."

He brightened up considerably. "Good, then! Just warning you, they don't even try to make good decisions when it comes to rooming. Might not get your first choice in rooming, but hey, a job's a job."

"I'd drink to that," I said, nodding as I took in the information.

"I might just take you up on that offer, depending on how this first day goes. My shift starts tomorrow. They got dock boys hired a good while ago, just getting her all fired up for the maiden voyage."

The narrow passage widened into a makeshift lobby, looking as fine as they could make it for aluminum walls. A boy who could be no older, if even, than fifteen, sat at the a table, piles of paper to his ears. He wore a smile as wide as the paperwork before him. I wondered what must have happened to him, to be working this young.

"Hello, sirs!" he said cheerfully. I could tell that he definitely wasn't fifteen. I'd estimate twelve. "M'name's Peter, and I'm the rooming manager! Make it all organized, and the like. I know you, white-haired boy."

Gil bristled. "I'm not just white-haired boy; I'm Gilbert Beilschmidt, you're a squirt, and you will respect me."

Peter ruffled through the pages for a brief moment, before glancing up with a mischievous look. I held in laughter. "Gilbert Beilschmidt, working in the engines. I'm above you."

"You ain't!"

"Am so!"

I couldn't help it-a loud snort escaped my nose. I covered my mouth, trying to calm the giggles in my chest. "Damn, Gil, you're acting like a kid now. Don't you wanna impress me?"

"Thought I already had."

"I've lived on the open frontier. Takes more than a German to impress me." I turned to Peter. Blond hair, blue eyes, wide smile, bright-eyed optimism-he looked like how I used to be. Maybe, I could have been him, if I'd found out my heritage earlier and gone to the east where my heart took me. "Alfred Jones?"

"We got no Alfred Jones."

"Ah." I lowered my voice and tried my best to ignore Gil's incriminating gaze. "Er, Alfred Williams."

He stole out another document and skimmed through a pages, humming mindlessly as he did so. "Uh-huh, uh-huh, yep." In a good impression of a learned secretary, he thumped the papers back into order. "We got Alfred Williams. Room One-Double-Ought, with Kiku Honda."

"Thank you, Peter."

"No problem, sir." He waved me off, and Gil and I went off down a separate passage.

"Kiku...Honda?" I said questioningly. "We got Japs on this boat?"

Gil shook his head condescendingly. "I think you were deep down, dreamer boy. We got people from all over here. They play it like we're all English here, but 'English' is getting to be a broad definition. From what I've met, we've got people from France, Germany-Well, technically Rod is from Austria and Lizzy from Hungary, her real name's Elizaveta-bodyguard from Russia, bartender from China. They tend to hide the odd-lookin ones behind the scenes, and in the belly, like…" He trailed off.

I picked up on his drift. "Stupid. All you got is white hair. No one'd even notice."

He waved his hand dismissively. "Not so much me; this is the job Ludwig got me. But if I had a choice to stay or go, I don't think I would get to go. Look at my eyes."

"Gray," I said automatically.

"Thanks, but wrong. Purple. I got the only albinism streak in my town."

"And I got the only musical streak in mine," I said. "Just imagine how many people called it a fiddle."

He laughed, half-bemused. "See, this is why America isn't the place for me. Too young. Too big. Too fast. Give me the world and all the old and wisened places, and I'll be fine and dandy. You can trust 'em. They've done the same things for hundreds of years and they've done fine."

I thought of all the things I'd done in America-the shameful things, like following Lucia Monteron into that back alley in Detroit and stealing Mattie's paper when I was ten, the hard things, like getting into all the orchestras and the school, making my way across the country with little money to spare. The ever-piling smoke of the cities and the dingy apartments that I built my life upon. The cramped rooms, the half-cooked food, the constant flow of dirt-covered immigrants.

But then I remembered everything else. The newly-opened foreign restaurants, haunting smells floating through the streets of Manhattan. The chatter of the rail lines heading from east out to Oregon. The peaceful beauty of my Minnesota village, the cool air, the fields, the hot sun and choking sweat of the farms in the summer, the dusty buildings and peaceful churches, the rock on that waterfall, the house of fresh wood that my former father put together with his bare hands. The tunes I played besides my dad on his fiddle on the lonely, star-filled nights, and those same nights when I climbed atop the roof with Mattie and just watched. The freshly-snared rabbit, the bobsled rides we took in the winter months, the open wagon road at the edge of town extending to the horizon of forever. Maybe Gil could be given the whole world and be happy, but I, being the selfish thing I am, I couldn't have it any other way.

"I don't know," I said. "You don't either. I don't know your way, and you don't know mine. Won't know 'til you've tried."

"Now, here's something I'll drink toward." He raised his right hand in a mock imitation of a glass. "Here's the split-off. You're to the left. I'll catch you later, buddy-know where you live, anyhow. I'll bring around some friends."

I chuckled. "And let's hope that by that time I'll have some friends as well. Nice meeting you, mate."

We went our separate ways. I branched off to my left and made my way down the passage, skimming my fingers along the metal plating. Occasionally, some sign would pop up: "Rooms 1-25, 26-50, 50-75". I didn't know how long I was walking, but I was set in my own thoughts. It was entirely silent except for the occasional murmur from the cabins and the deep, thrumming, pre-voyage hum that she gave off. There were lights spaced every so often, but overall, the passage was doused in shadow.

I glanced down at my feet and cases. My feet were getting weary from walking and my fingers were, too, from holding the cases. I couldn't wait to get settled down, and then to eat, and then-finally-to play, and then to sleep. It was all planned out, in my head, and I knew that time would pass so quickly on this first night.

All stupid, slow thoughts really, because in the next instant, my violin crashed to the floor, as did my suitcase, and I myself felt something warm and light crash into my chest.

My first instinct was to save my instrument, as it was with all good musicians. I dove down and saved it just before it hit the ground. "Ey, I got you, baby," I muttered soothingly to her, stroking her case.

"Excuse me, but what did you say?" a voice said. A male voice. A person's voice. Audibly irritated.

"Aw, damn, sorry," I said, scrambling with loose arms at my fallen items. "I, er, wasn't talking to you. I was talking to my instrument. My instrument, yeah. Didn't even know you were there."

"Well, thanks," he said sardonically. "That makes me feel so much better."

I shrugged guiltily. "Musician. Can't help it. Violin's been with me for years. It's my first priority." I winced. "That sounded awful, didn't it?"

"Let's just say you should probably shut up now."I got my cases settled at last and trusted myself to look upwards at the man. Truthfully, I should have expected that he would be the opposite of what I thought he would look like, but when you're on the floor of the biggest ship in the world, speaking to a violin, and continuously and unintentionally insulting an anonymous man, you really shouldn't expect anything.

He was, for a man, beautiful-beautiful in a way that transcended gender, a unique, ethereal beauty that belonged to something inhuman. It might have been just me. He was probably just an average bloke. But my mind connected the dots-eyes like my Minnesota home, hair like the North Dakota fields, a delicate nose, a strong jaw-yes, they all lined up in my head, and all I could draw from that was pure and simple beauty.

I shook it off. Those were an artist's thoughts, and those were not mine. Writing is the profession of lying. Art is the profession of bending and interpreting the truth. Music is the profession of truth, inner, deep, strong truth, raw and merciless. It was why I'd never given it up when I grew. It was because I was tired of lies.

And though it didn't make much sense, the logic was very simple-it was a man, and men were not beautiful. My place was with women like Lucia. Yes.

I bristled instinctively. "Well, rude."

"I'm not being rude, I'm being honest. And don't you like honesty?"

I furrowed my brows and opened my mouth. He was likely just assuming things about me-everyone liked honesty, right? But it rang true, especially for me. Hung up for years on a girl who turned out to be a prostitute, kicked out after figuring out the truth, being twisted by competitors in the application process for the south side orchestra. I was probably developing a fear of lies, or an allergy, a condition, a disease. "How did you-"

He tilted his head. "Assumption," of course.

"Who are you to assume things about me?" I half-shouted. "Gettin' creepy, the way you talk."

"Creepy? Childish word."

"I'm no child!"

"Really now?"

"I sure ain't!"

"That's odd," he said. "Why are you acting like a child now? I thought you were trying to impress me." His face held a knowing blankness.

"I'm not trying to...impress...you," I finished slowly, my eyes widening with shock.

"I must be off," he said briskly, trying to move around me.

"No," I said quickly, moving to block his path. He sidestepped to the right. I mirrored his movements. He stepped back to the left, and I blocked him. I spun my features into a thoughtful frown. "You aren't going anywhere until you can explain why you just repeated my conversation with Gil, word for word."

"I saw you," he said simply.

"Saw me?" I questioned. "There was no one else in that room, just me, Gil, and the kid."

"I was in the hallway. It was dark. You couldn't see me."

"Behind me?" He nodded. "I call bullshit on that one. You walked into me from the opposite direction. You couldn't have passed me."

"I didn't," he responded. "You must be new, if you think that there's only one way in and out of the staff rooms."

"You must move 'mpossbly fast," I accused.

He smiled ominously. "Maybe I do," he said. "Now, I really must be going. I'm a busy man and this is a big ship, boy." I couldn't bring myself to move, to speak, to think, to even watch as he brushed past me. I'd never been called slow, but I felt I was now, trying to process his words. The only thing I was aware of was the clatter of his leather shoes as he strode away into the shadows.

On the wall to my left, a wall lamp sputtered and died.


End file.
